The present invention relates to a font generation technique particularly for printers and the like.
According to conventional printing techniques, dot-matrix fonts are stored in a bit pattern, which is scanned along successive rows (raster scan format) or scanned along successive columns (column scan format). The raster scan format is employed by page printers and the column scan format is employed by serial printers such as dot impact printers. For printing outline fonts, which represents the outline of a font by a coordinate system, two bit map converters are usually provided respectively for raster and column scan formats.
If a font generation apparatus serves different types of printers, it must be provided with two memories for different scan formats for printing bit-map fonts, and two bit map converters for different scan formats for printing outline fonts.